Intercounty Racketball open Results!

On the 14th & 15th June UK Racketball headed up to Wolverhampton Tennis & Squash Club for the 2025 Men’s and Women’s Intercounty finals weekend.

This event featured Men’s A and B Grade categories, and the Women’s Open category, and it was great to see not only the largest uptake of sides to date, but also a really great spread from across the country, including new teams such as Wales and Worcestershire in the mix.

Starting with the Women’s draw, it was fantastic to see a large age range taking part, from U17 juniors all the way through to O60s players. With last year's champions Yorkshire unable to make it, and last year’s runners up Lincolnshire being weakened by the loss of a couple of their top players, the draw was very open. In the end it came down to the two new sides in the competition Dorset and Surrey, the south coast team proving incredibly consistent across the two days of matches, dropping less matches overall than Surrey, meaning that they won their group on point count back. Congratulations to the Dorset side and indeed the Surrey side in both of their first years in the event, I’m sure with the return of Yorkshire next year the battle will hot up even further!

The Men’s B Grade category is always an interesting one to watch play out, with a lot of teams having some quite drastic changes of personnel in the lead up to the event, making it almost impossible to accurately predict what is going to happen! As it turned out, Devon B scrapped their way through to the final overtaking Kent A in the semis by a solitary game, won in the very final match of the fixture, the doubles tie!
They went onto lose to a very classy Shropshire B team, featuring several recognisable series regulars in Chris Wase, Barry Talbot and co. Wase masterminding an excellent Intercounty year, winning both of the O50s and the B Grade category with his Shropshire team mates! Captain Fantastic!

The A Grade was joined by some new teams and some very high-quality new faces as well! With top Pro Squash players such as George Parker for Leics playing at one (over British O35 RB Open and National RB Champion Ali Mutch at two,) and Miles Jenkins and Noah Meredith in for Surrey at one & two, and Oli Rawlins and for Worcestershire at one, that certainly has been a jump in standard in the top end!

Despite this and even having lost virtually a whole team of players to injury and unavailability (numbers 2/3/4 in their strongest line up,) Devon a managed to fight their way past both Yorkshire in the first round, and Leicestershire in the semi-final to make the final once again. Stand out performances coming from Darcy Boyle on his Racketball Intercounty debut in the first match, and then old hands Mike Gregory and Ash Knight in the semi-final. All three players recording very classy hard fought wins to send their side through.

In the end, however, the might of Surry proved to be too much, the solitary win for Devon coming at Number 1 string, Mike Harris and Miles Jenkins having a 90 minute battle, Devon's Harris coming through 3/2 in a brutal game.

Congratulations to Surrey for taking the A Grade title and the Women's runner-up spot. But well done to everyone that took part across the two days of battles, there were some really high-quality games and it was great to see some new faces mixing in with the series, faithful.

Lots of pictures and video clips from the weekend are up on our UK Racketball Facebook page in this album:https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1659179818362899&type=3​

We are also uploading some matches onto our new YouTube channel, you can check them out here: https://youtube.com/@ukracketballgb?si=wGRWXI41vZnagHvC​

Finally, you can find the full results from the weekend and the match scorecard on our UK Racketball website (coming very soon)

Massive thank you for Wolverhampton for hosting us so well, a fantastic venue with some very high-quality courts. Thank you all to all the team captains who always have a thankless task and gets excited together, herding cats seems the appropriate term!